A mystery has
finally been solved and, very appropriately, it happened in October.
Way back in 2015, I wrote about "those hazy, uncertain movie and TV moments" of our youth. Moments that become embedded in our minds, but without enough information to confirm their existence or track down their titles.
I had three mysteries.
The first two were finally solved in 2015, with the help of the internet.
No. 1 was
The Man From Nowhere, a spooky, hour-long drama produced by the UK's Children's Film Foundation in 1975. I had first watched it on cable in the early 1980s, but it took me decades to confirm I hadn't misremembered or just dreamt it.
No. 2 was, hilariously, 1971's
Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Pretty much all I had remembered was an Igor-type character who loved his cats. Turns out there was some misremembering there. It was a puppy, not cats, that Lon Chaney Jr. loved.
Kindertrauma came to the rescue, and the memory would gnaw at me no more.
But No. 3 had dogged me for more than 40 years. Until yesterday. This is the passage I've been using, hoping it would jog someone's memory on a message board or social media, or have the "secret sauce" keywords for a successful internet search:
"A man arrives at an inn that is (of course) in the middle of nowhere. He checks in alongside another new guest, a middle-aged woman. During the evening, the man meets a beautiful young woman, who is also staying at the inn. They eventually go back to his room for a romantic engagement and are in the midst of said engagement when the clock strikes midnight and the woman turns evil and attacks him. (I think maybe her eyes change somehow.) It turns out that everyone in the inn, except for the man and the middle-aged woman who checked in at the same time, are malevolent beings intent on killing the guests. In the mayhem, a fire erupts. The man tries to save the middle-aged woman but cannot, so he flees the burning building. The next morning, the man and a police officer he told his story to arrive at the site of the inn. But there's nothing there. No inn. No sign of fire. Just an empty field. But not entirely empty. The corpse of the middle-aged woman is there, among the tall grass. The end. ... I'm pretty sure this was an episode of a horror anthology series, like Tales from the Darkside or Hammer House of Horror. And I think it was a British production. I saw it circa 1984."
Despite the amount of detail, I'd had no success in years of searching. Part of the problem was that there were so many U.S., Canadian and British horror anthology TV series between the mid-1970s and 1984. This was the era of Hammer House of Horror, Darkroom, Tales of the Unexpected and numerous other similar shows, many of which have faded into obscurity. There were a few kind and helpful suggestions offered over the years. One person was positive it was an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but I'm pretty sure I would have remembered Darren McGavin. But all the good leads eventually led to dead ends.
But I finally,
finally found it! Every couple years I do another round of searching and I hit paydirt this time, because the whole episode, with keywords, was
uploaded to YouTube in May 2025 by Maljardin.
Drum roll: It's an episode of the 1978 anthology series
The Next Step Beyond. The series was a remake of the far-better-remembered
Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond, which ran from 1959 to 1961.
The Next Step Beyond was made directly for syndication and was a dud, lasting one season and 25 episodes.
One of those episodes, #19, was "The Haunted Inn." Indeed, it has been haunting me for 40-plus years.
It turns out my memory of it was pretty damn good:
- A man arrives at an inn in the middle of nowhere. Correct.
- He checks in alongside another new guest, a middle-aged woman. Correct.
- He meets a beautiful young woman, who is also staying at the inn. Correct.
- They eventually go back to his room for a romantic engagement and are in the midst of said engagement when the clock strikes midnight and the woman turns evil and attacks him. (I think maybe her eyes change somehow.) Almost all correct, though there's no clock that strikes midnight.
- The inn is full of malevolent beings. Correct.
- The man tries to save the middle-aged woman but cannot. Correct.
- He flees the burning building. Partially correct. The building doesn't explode into flames (in stock footage) until he's exited. There was no money in the tiny budget for actual flames on the set.
- There's no inn and no sign of fire the next morning when the man returns with a police officer. Correct.
- All that's there is the corpse of the middle-aged woman. Correct!
- I think it was a British production. Incorrect!
Watching "The Haunted Inn"
on YouTube yesterday, I was surprised to see that the man is played by
James Keach. Though he has done fine work elsewhere, I know him almost entirely from
Moving Violations, which ran endlessly on cable in the late 1980s.
John Newland introduces and concludes the episode, in Rod Serling fashion. I hadn't remembered that part at all. Keach is joined by actors Patricia Joyce, Lorna Thayer, Buck Young and Robert V. Barron.
Amazingly, historian/critic
John Kenneth Muir wrote about this episode all the way back in 2008
on his Wordpress blog, but I never stumbled across it in my web searches. He praises the episode's creepiness and the "dead white eyes" and concludes: "There are other episodes of
The Next Step Beyond which are more accurate to the details of paranormal literature, but none which go for balls-to-the-wall, visceral horror like 'The Haunted Inn.' The goal here is simply to scare and there’s something about the cheap look of the videotape and the simplicity of this 'ghost story' that works in tandem to create an occasionally unnerving half-hour. Not a great show, but a decent one. And sadly, it’s probably the best
The Next Step Beyond ever got."
I'm thrilled but it's also a little bittersweet that this mystery is now solved. I'm not sure I have any remaining mysteries from my youth left to pursue. What do I do now??
Here are some stills from "The Haunted Inn." I can finally say it exists!
